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Long-Form Journalism Finds an Online Friend

By Sam Grobart November 4, 2010 5:25 pmNovember 4, 2010 5:25 pm

The homepage of Longreads, a site that collects links to long-form journalism from around the Web.

Anyone who’s spent time writing for the Web knows the basic rule: Keep it short. Attention spans, we are told, are collapsing faster than pig houses on Angry Birds. At this rate, municipalities won’t just fluoridate their city water supply, they’ll have to Ritalinize it as well.

Standing athwart this progress, yelling “Stop,” is Longreads, a project created by Mark Armstrong, who is also the content chief at personal-finance site Bundle. Longreads’ premise is to collect, collate and curate long-form journalism for online reading. It started in April 2009 as a Twitter hashtag. Users who found long (1,500+ word) articles or stories could append #longreads to the article’s url and tweet it. Followers of @longreads would then get a daily river of lengthy, in-depth fiction and nonfiction from magazines, newspapers and online publications.

Last week, Longreads added a Web site, longreads.com. Visitors there can see the latest tweets, as well as search through a fully tagged and categorized library of previous tweets. The two main variables are search term and story length. (Longreads assumes that the average reader can take in 250 words per minute.) Interested in technology and have 45 minutes to spare? Longreads has this interview with Steve Jobs from 1995 for a Smithsonian oral-history project. Too lengthy? Too much already about Steve Jobs? Then perhaps you would be interested in this seven-minute New York Magazine article about Yale University Press’s The Anthology of Rap.

Mr. Armstrong came up for the idea of Longreads when he ran out of things to do on his subway commute. “There’s no Wi-Fi down there, and there are only so many old e-mails you can read,” he said. He became a devoteé of Instapaper, the quick-archiving app that lets you set aside good reading for offline mobile viewing, but even that didn’t do the trick. “I ran out of things to read,” Mr. Armstrong said. So he decided to crowdsource his reading list, starting @longreads on Twitter and asking people to post the meatier stuff they were reading and enjoying on the Web. Since then, the Longreads Twitter account has picked up almost 9,200 followers.

By Mr. Armstrong’s measure, Longreads is the perfect complement to services like Instapaper or Flipboard, the iPad app that is a graphics-intensive presentation of your social-network feed. The idea is that Longreads serves as a suggestion and discovery engine that you encounter on Twitter or Flipboard, and then Instapaper is the mechanism to save that article for later. “It’s the kind of curation that’s perfect for those environments,” Mr. Armstrong said.

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